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About Me

I live and blog in Ann Arbor, Michigan. University of Michigan BA and MA from Eastern Michigan University. One term in the Michigan Army National Guard. The Institute of Land Warfare, Army magazine, Infantry Magazine, Military Review, Naval Institute Proceedings, and Joint Force Quarterly have published my occasional articles. See "Published Works" on the web version for citations.

The Undead Archives

My undead archives pre-Blogger were actually restored to life after Geocities sites went dark. Start at the old home page here.
If you find a link to the old site on the current site or old site, you should be able to replace the "g" in "geocities" with an "r" and make a good link.
Another archived site is here.
It replaces the ".com" with ".ws".
I hope to move all the older archives here (and started that project) but it is really tedious.

Our few special forces and intelligence agents backed by air power smashed the Taliban army in 2001. The French used a tiny military force to blitz their way through the jihadis controlling northern Mali last year.

The Iraqis probably don't have that military capability, unless their counter-terrorism forces are capable of fighting as formed units. That's probably a waste of their capabilities even if they could do it. We don't treat 30 SEALs as a really good platoon of infantry, now do we?

We could organize the general purpose Iraqi units for a plodding assault north. But it will be ugly even if successful.

We need a core of a mobile offensive force that can shatter the jihadis by moving north and calling down precision fire to smash up the jihadis as they try to defend their newly won caliphate.

Nearly 11 months later, there apparently are no core forces capable of leading a mobile offensive to shatter ISIL. The recapture of Tikrit was a success but it did not lead to further gains.

Jordan seems angry enough at ISIL but there's been no news about their ground forces entering the war.

The Kurds are grinding forward but don't seem to have the armaments to provide a really potent core ground offensive force.

Our training efforts don't seem to have put any decent regular Iraqi army troops into the field yet.

And there are no mercenary units hired that could spearhead an offensive.

Mind you, we could be husbanding the decent brigades in reserve while counting on the existing frontline units to hold in order to avoid throwing decent units into meat grinder defensive battles against ISIL that would wreck their offensive potential.

That's possible. Perhaps even likely.

But we are not even supporting the frontline Iraqis from the air in sufficient quantities with sufficient coordination to hold the line until we have gathered enough forces capable of leading offensives.

Islamic State militants overran Iraqi government defences east of the city of Ramadi on Thursday, police and pro-government tribal fighters said.

The defensive line was breached at Husaiba, about 10 km (six miles) from the city, on Thursday afternoon after IS fighters intensified mortar and rocket fire.

If ISIL forces Iraq's defenders back to the gates of Baghdad, ISIL may not be able to take the city but they will be able to carry out terrorist attacks rather easily.

Also, after all this time, Iraqi troops not having hand-held anti-armor weapons capable of stopping ISIL's improvised armored vehicles used as IEDs to breach defensive barriers--as we say was the problem at Ramadi--is inexcusable.

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Note on site statistics: When I strip out the junk hits from Blogger statistics that seem to come and go in waves, I appear to have about 10,000 hits per month.

My old statistics package, Site Meter, seems to miss a lot and even disappears visits after they've appeared.

I just added a new StatCounter. So far it shows far fewer hits than Blogger and is more in line with Site Meter. But I suspect neither of the non-Blogger statistics register hits from social media. So I'm not sure what my audience size is. It is puzzling to me.

Of course, it is quite possible that my failure to use Facebook and Twitter has handicapped me in getting an audience. Or it may be an additional issue. I may be a blogosaur!